Telephone Directory

What I faced

KONE launched an intranet telephone directory, which was created by an external vendor.

At the time I was a Usability Specialist at KONE R&D and used the system often.

There was a major flaw in the design of the system: it required a login with a username and a password to look for a telephone number, altough all the users where from the same IP, the same intranet and the same location.

I calculcated the time wasted by this system. The number was huge, thousands of dollars a month.

What I did

On my own initiative I decided to make the system better.

I created a page in the intranet. In this page the users would enter their username, personal password and a global password. The page would create a custom URL for the user.

With this URL the user is logged into the system automatically and instantly, without typing his username, password and the global password.

What came of it

A great majority of the tens of thousands of people in the company created a personal URL. Obviously a large number of people were frustrated with the telephone directory.

Later, I recieved at least twice the amount of inquiries concerning usability issues of KONE products. Since then usability gained a much larger foothold in the company.

The small site was a great way to highlight the importance of fluent workflow and how easy it is to hinder it seriously.